It was a few days before Alan cautiously allowed himself to care.

Life he could cope with, if only through sheer habit. Death as well, with enough fine spirits to compensate for his bad ones and the bleak but reassuring notion that what was done was done.

A coma was suspended animation, was a held breath that might never be released. Alan had accordingly suspended all emotion, had toyed with the thought of writing himself a memo in careful, even block letters: KARA IN COMA. INSTRUCT GOD TO EXCUSE ANY PAST ASSOCIATION WITH ALAN SHORE (MYSELF).

He'd attempted it, actually, but the pen had insisted on slanting in strange directions, the words jumbling into one another and nearly toppling off the slip of paper. Four tries was too many.

He waited three days and called Fred, discovered Kara was lying comatose in a building not five blocks from his office.

There was little reason to visit. The hospital, while doubtless a prime getaway spot for the sick and dying, was hardly known for its cuisine. He harbored no interest in last July's issue of Parenting magazine, so a visit for the purposes of entertainment was out of the question. And Kara was comatose. It wasn't as though she'd awake from her coma and demand to know precisely who'd been there and how frequently and the number of tears shed.

Nevermind that that's what Alan himself would have done under such circumstances. Which, strangely enough, settled the issue.

He purchased flowers and enough Spongebob paraphernalia to call into question his sexual orientation and mortify Kara at least back into a coma if not to death when she woke and saw it. There was also her birthday consider--why was it that he could never manage to spend a birthday bereft of consciousness?

Comatose, nearly-sixteen-year-old girls were extremely difficult to shop for, as these things went. Sixteen itself was a staggering concept. Here she was, in a coma, and she still had another year's wait until the viewing of R-rated movies became permissible.

After discarding any number of ideas, he decided on Scrubs on DVD--the name "Zach Braff" had emerged occasionally in Kara's journal, between exclamation marks. Besides, it seemed somewhat clever and ironic all through the ride home. By the time he set foot in his hotel, it seemed in poor taste.

He gathered everything up and thought to knock on Victoria's door on the way out.